The subject matter disclosed herein relates to an enclosure and, more particularly, to an enclosure for electronic components with enhanced cooling.
Cooling of electronics boxes in various industries, such as aerospace applications, is becoming more challenging as heat losses and densities grow and thermal environments deteriorate. Generally, electronics boxes include power conversion or motor drives that typically have low temperature devices, such as switches, capacitors and control circuits disposed on printed wiring boards (PWBs), and higher temperature electromagnets, such as inductors and transformers. These bulky devices are often mounted to the box walls for natural convection air cooling or are conductively cooled by a cold plate that is supplied with coolant from an external cooling loop.
Such conventional packaging tends to exhibit limited cooling effectiveness due to several reasons. Among these is the fact that heat from the windings, the largest source of inefficiencies, of electromagnetics must be conducted through the iron cores to the box walls or the cold plate. Another reason for the limited cooling effectiveness is that the devices with lower temperature limits reside in the same hot air environment as dictated by the hottest part of the transformers and inductors. Additionally, in natural convection or conductively cooled boxes, the high power density switches do not have an effective dedicated heat sink.